


Blood Markers

by Twilit



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 18:35:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3178823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twilit/pseuds/Twilit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As with its non-biological counterparts, there are no single, definitive genetic markers of addiction. Though much has been made of the fact that alcoholism is hereditary, its root causes are varied and influenced by many other factors, up to and including the choices Rose Lalonde makes in her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood Markers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bannanachan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bannanachan/gifts).



> Prompt: I would love to see some Lalondes dealing with substance abuse issues in a realistic way. Setting and guest characters are your call, but please no Lalondecest; it's really not my thing.

“Hi, my name is Roxy Lalonde, and I’m an alcoholic.”

The words are spoken from a steel-and-cushion chair, in a neutral dark beige room of the local library. The carpets are plush, the air is clean, and everything is quiet until the inevitable, affirming response. Eyes so pale as to be nearly pink water, and she flushes under the attention, casting her gaze down.

It’s taken a long time to get where she is. From Algeria to France, and then to America. Through university, graduate degrees, critical and academic acclaim and now to this. Can you still measure yourself a success when everything you have done runs up against those words? Can you still call yourself a woman after failing your child this badly?

Can you look at yourself in the mirror? 

The answer, to that last one at least, is no.

* * *

Roxy Lalonde dies at fifty-two of heart complications arising from metastasizing lung cancer. People say she died quietly in her sleep and that’s the line they’ll use for her funeral, for her obituary. To Rose Lalonde, the truth is more complex. She died in her sleep, to be sure, but quiet is stretching. For weeks her mother had been wracked by untreatable pain arising from her cancer, and the rate at which she chewed through opiates didn’t seem to lessen it much.

She died in her bed, because she couldn’t stand the hospital anymore.

She said that she wanted to die by her daughter.

She never asked what her daughter wanted.

Rose Lalonde grew up with a successful, world-famous mother who was either a) not there or b) extremely drunk. Her excuse was that every second she was away from work was a blessing she needed to make the most of. Having a child didn’t seem to slow her any, and for a long while, little Rose Lalonde wondered how she’d been born without defects. An older Rose Lalonde became aware that the drinking had only become uncontrollable after she was born.

Any of those Roses knew that they had to take care of themselves. Little Rose watches nannies cook and clean, and mimics them. Tickled pink, a tipsy Roxy mimics her and does more around the house. Wasted, not much gets done effectively, and Rose watches that more closely. So much of what Rose learns outside of school is to spite her drunk mother’s carelessness that when Roxy one day returns from France and says she is going to AA meetings, sixteen year old Rose is so shocked that all she can raise is derision.

* * *

Roxy Lalonde goes to her first meeting, derision still fresh in her mind, knowing she has to do better. Passive aggression has long since faded, replaced with distance and contempt.

* * *

Rose doesn’t find the hospital bill until she is packing her mother’s things. It makes her late for college and it takes her two years back. Severe abrasions, multiple fractured ribs, pierced lung, concussion… the list of damages from a fall down Paris stairs goes on. She puts it away with the rest of the things and stares dully out a window, wondering what else her mother didn’t tell her as more pieces fall into place.

* * *

College is a chance for a new life to the young French-American. She can put her skills, her mind to work. She doesn’t engage in the party lifestyle for reasons plainly obvious to her and anyone who knows her. A glass of wine with friends, on a date, perhaps. Anyone who tries to push more on her gets a cold glare and an icier reception for the near future.

It is a point of pride, a sticking point, that she is utterly in control of how much and when she drinks; that is, little and rarely. She is not her mother, working hard but filling her free hours with rampant intoxication.

She is not her mother. She works hard and then relaxes. She finds things that set her mind at ease. Knitting, crocheting, beating the will to live out of anonymous parties on the internet via Scrabble. She will not fall into the same pit. She never understood what drove her mother to seek enjoyment in a bottle.

* * *

She never understood that it wasn’t about enjoyment or happiness. It was about running, running from a world that needed so much more than she could give. A world with her daughter in it.

It was stress escape, abandonment of the self.

* * *

In Psych, students learn the difference between the act of enjoying getting drunk, or high, and the state of addiction. They have less to do with one another than people think, outside the obvious intrinsic tie. It is, for example, entirely possible to become addicted to substances that do not have an obvious psychotropic effect.

That is only of distant interest to Rose. Or perhaps it is a natural aversion to those particular fields of study, fields hitting too close to home. She knows that she will never smoke or drink to excess and therefore will never fall victim to those perils. She would rather look into the abyss of the human mind, puzzle out its secrets of psychological causation, of other chemical imbalances.

Rose does a double degrees in psychology and biological psychiatry, all the way up to the PhD level, where she focuses on psychology on the advice of her advisor. It is not advisable, and basically impossible, to do two PhD’s at once. It also shows a degree of academic indecisiveness, a weakness of character.

It is then the grandest of ironies, or perhaps just a failing of interdisciplinary studies, that she doesn’t learn much about the genetic markers for addiction.

* * *

The first time Rose does anything resembling drugs is in the first year of her MA. Second semester is doing a number on her and her due dates are unforgiving. Late nights in the stacks are not uncommon and one gets to know the crowd. Like the last bacteria in the petri dish, they keep their distance, move about in quiet, separate desperation. Flagellant labour takes on its double meaning. 

When the coffee shops close and the stacks lock up, staying awake becomes an issue, particularly for those into their thirty-six hour. One bright young physicist, dark skin, lovely jade eyes, offers caffeine pills to the lock-ins and she goes through that little treasure box faster than textbook falling. The pills get Rose through the entirety of her proposal by morning and the girl with the dark hair and eyes like green suns into her bed by noon.

They needed _some_ way to get to sleep, after all.

* * *

But Jade isn’t always there, and Rose’s work piles up. Getting caffeine pills is easy enough, getting over them to be rested enough to run tutorials and sections is more difficult. If it was her own work, she’d slog through, and even with the freshmen classes she does. The upper year tutorials are where she has to juggle her time, balance thirty-six, forty-eight hour days with enough sleep to be coherent.

“Be sure to get at least 8 hours of sleep when taking this product,” the sleeping pills say. Rose collapses into the small bed in the student ghetto and gladly takes the eight.

* * *

A few months later, it’s ten, then closer to twelve to catch up on sleep missed during the time spent writing dissertations.

And then longer, to make up for time spent asleep.

* * *

It wears on you, this cycle.

It wears on you, that you plod through the halls, what colour the world had this winter drained away by this cycle of uppers and downers. Your coffee is an afterthought, a bitter habit, barely worthy of the term “caffeine delivery vehicle,” but you may as well slurp it down, you need to stay hydrated and water is even worse. Lunch may as well taste like ash. Your only solace is achievement, the cleverness of your own mind, academic advancement.

It wears on you, such that you don’t even notice what you are going through until you turn the page to the end of a book and realize you cannot remember what it was about.

It wears on Rose Lalonde like this, and she spends a long, long time staring at a wall, feeling out the dead spaces inside her. It is halfway through the thought, _I wonder when it might be acceptable for me go to sleep_ that she realizes there really ought to be something done about this.

Before she knows what it is she is doing, Rose finds herself in the bathroom, plucking pills from the drug cabinet, thinking to finally get through that chapter she has been working on. But in front of her is something else. Little blue pills, left one night by Jade. She knows what they are, of course, she does not judge. But it occurs to her, perhaps there’s the answer. Emotions lit in hyper-awareness, the rave's drug of choice.

She pops one into her hand, and absently shuts the cabinet door. The dull click draws her eyes back up and she looks at herself in the mirror. The make-up cannot hide the circles under her eyes, or the bleached pallor of her skin. A drawn mouth accepts the pill from a delicate hand, but none of what she sees is this.

A wrinkling hand, pushing a glass of wine to coloured lips. Glassy eyes shining brightly but unfocusing, while tears drip down a face already sheened with sweat.

 _Like mother, like daughter,_ the cruel voice of internalized self-loathing speaks, and she screams.

A vicious punch thrown in reaction shatters the cabinet mirror and the _pain_ of it is suddenly the most she’s felt in _ages_. Eyes skitter off pill bottles, packages, on the sink, in the garbage and suddenly it is too much. Bleeding, slipping on the slick floor, Rose throws herself at the toilet and hurls, emptying her stomach with no experience and little accuracy.

And still, _Like mother, like daughter_.

* * *

Roxy Lalonde takes a drag off a cigarette as she tries to remember which side street the hotel is on. She’s been to Paris at least, like, six times now, but this is a new hotel. The conference was paying, so she wasn’t saying no. Tonight was good, she thinks. Plenty of wine, some cuties to wink and and blush, and of course, the food!

One step, eighteen stairs and forty-five minutes later, Roxy’s opinion of the night, of herself, has changed drastically. Forty-five minutes in pain at the bottom of cold, slick stairs before someone finds her, crying in the dark from pain so bad she can barely breathe, let alone stand.

* * *

Some changes come to late.

* * *

Others, the jury is still out on.

* * *

To her horror, Jade finds Rose in the bathroom, hours later, curled beside the tub, bloody streaks all over the floor. Her hands are a lacerated mess from the initial strike, then the clumsy, heartsick attempts to cover it all up. Her arms are torn and rent where nails and glass ripped through shoulder and upper arm in devastating hatred of the self. Pale vomit coats the inside of the bowl and on the rim of the toilet in small lines where a clean-up has been attempted.

She is still, so still.

“Rose?” Jade asks, terrified. A flinch then, a whole body convulsion away from the sound, deeper into a ball and the physicist rushes in to her girlfriend. Gory hands clutch at the wounds on her arms and Jade is overcome by hesitation, indecision of what to do, say, how to hold Rose.

“Rose, what happened?”

A long time passes before Rose speaks, before she can speak. She has to find the words, find the armour, put herself back together. Jade doesn’t deserve this, doesn’t deserve to be held down by someone this blind, this doomed. But she is Rose Lalonde, and she can find the words, don the armour, and still know that there is more to be done.

“I looked into the abyss,” she croaks out. “And my mother looked back.”

Her eyes come up, cloudy grey things now, set in bloodshot pearl, and fix on Jade. 

“Help?”

* * *

The words are spoken from a plastic stool, in an empty, echoing auditorium, a space virtually condemned by the university. The floor is cold, glossy and hard; a multipurpose surface of pressed wood, medium-density fibreboard. Eyes so dark as to be a storm cloud, shot through with violet lightning come up, and she braces herself.

“Hello. My name is Rose Lalonde, and I’m an addict.”


End file.
